Notices by a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)

here i go, i'm about to try switching to wayland from nvidia X11 to try to make an accessibility feature work properly and stop breaking other things on the system. let me place my bets:
- it's not going to fix it, it is just another excuse in the pantheon of capricious desktop environment dev excuses (you can't report a bug on an old version not that we're saying it's fixed, we won't accept a bug report without you doing a bunch of clerical work for us you aren't equipped to do, etc) and

on the dial between "there's a useful thing in there maybe someday" and "it's wasting more time that it's ever gonna be worth, shoot it in the head twice to make sure it dies" the needle is still firmly over toward that second one imo

It's like, I'm not some kind of "it should just work" absolutist, but I think it must be tractable to users such that you can get the explanation of the relevant moving parts in the faq or whatever; and like I'm a dev with lots of track record in faffing around with things to get them to work, I feel like it's fair to say I represent the high end of the spectrum on that

I didn't even get as far as trying the feature, I incidentally tried to open mpv and with the default settings it just segfaults, like you could not make this stuff up

- the big nest of Popsicle sticks everything is made of to get basic functionality (e.g. video decode acceleration in a browser, etc.) is going to totally fall over

@cstross @KevinMarks Like that's basically saying the LLM bubble is an opportunity to do research in the actually useful parts of AI. Sure, but like you say, these companies waste billions on long shots all the time; they could do that any time they want

@cstross "Whether or not these investments end up being profitable before they depreciate, they are on the critical path to AI’s long-term impact." well, if it turns out it has no long-term impact, then nothing was on the critical path to its long term impact

@cstross but in any case, this is just "betting the farm on something stupid has no downside on the decision maker because of how bankruptcies work, the startups story"

like if anyone can say there is a risk of overinvesting in some new unproven experimental direction compared to existing stuff _they_ know works, it should be those guys

LB: it's funny to me that in the context of that AI bubble story is the Google CEO out there saying "The risk of underinvesting is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvesting for us here" -- like looking at the Google of 10 years ago, they were the company to beat in conventional AI natural language processing and pre-LLM machine learning as part of an actual product or service millions of people use every day,

it's like all of a sudden they decided their remaining existing products and services were worth zero and they urgently have to invest whatever they can in LLM like just another monster-of-the-week venture effort

In mastodon advanced view, I really wish there was like a button to temporarily hide pinned toots; I don't need to see somebody's wall of pinned toots when I just clicked on them to see their newest toots

It's tempting to draw a parallel of this situation with the CD vs the CD caddy or minidisc, and comparing the ordinary CD jewel case to the little paper envelope the 5 1/4" floppy comes in, the paper envelope has one key property: people actually used it

The 3.5" is designed so that people can dress them up by putting on their custom sized sticky label that pointlessly wraps around the disk and then cosplay that they're solid state storage, they're basically the answer to the question of "how can we implement a storage system that has the aesthetics of this specific TV prop"

And like, most of the badness of the 3.5" is to do with the ecosystems around them, like if you're using a 5.25" in real life it's 1986 and you're using a floppy-only machine and the drive is serviced properly because if it fails the system is useless and you fix it right away, whereas the average 3.5" is in the 90s / early 00s in some godforsaken lab or corporate desk machine and someone is trying to transfer some important file off a floppy in a drive that has never been cleaned since day 1

Like if you encounter somebody's old personal 5 1/4" floppy in the wild it's probably in its jacket and stored somewhere flat like a binder because this was necessary; you encounter a personal 3.5" floppy in the wild and it has spent time in the bottom of a bookbag with no further protection and is somewhat gunked up and maybe the shutter is bent and doesn't work right on its own anymore

LB: It's funny, like my take is like 80% the opposite of this; the 3.5" is overdesigned in ways that don't fundamentally protect it the ways people use it in real life, but make it bulkier and give it new failure modes

It's interesting to compare and contrast this with the soft, almost ceremonial, tit-for-tat retaliation Al Jazeera received in the US in 2003 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68961753

Ironic because I think these days social media provides a steady supply of reality-check prickles that keeps the AI irrational exuberance cloud relatively localized

Ironically grift-companies and "people just wanting to own a piece" just makes me think of the Facebook IPO, which seemed like an eternity after the Internet bubble